As you are aware, the role of a childhood friend is a very important one in society.  As your neighbor has no parents / one parent who is working out of the country it is very important that you fulfill your duties.  It has come to our attention that your performance in one of these key areas has begun to deteriorate.  Please seek to take proactive measures to ameliorate this situation before the next review period.  Find below a list of area(s) where improvement has been deemed necessary:

___ Waking up in the morning; it is your sole responsibility to wake bearer of this document up every morning in time for school / work.
___  Breakfast making duties
___  Lunch making duties
___  Dinner making duties
___  Not changing with the blinds open for an “accidental” glimpse
___  Cold duties: you are required to prepare rice porridge, get cold towels for the forehead, and lecture about how important it is to take care of a cold.
___  Having a lot of cute friends that could easily fall in love with your childhood friend

Thanks In Advance For Your Cooperation

1. main character sounds like Kyon from Haruhi
2. main character has a little sister
3. main character has no parents
4. main character has a childhood friend who cooks for him
5. the school has an ojousama in it
6. the school uses bloomers
7. main character trips and his hand lands on someone’s breast/butt
8. someone lands such that their crotch is in the main character’s face
9. main character gets a nosebleed
10. episode is a beach trip
11. episode is a summer festival
12. episode is an onsen visit
13. episode involves bathing suits for no apparent reason
14. little sister has a crush on her brother
15. breasts have that official *squish squish* sound when they’re groped
16. someone does the “oh ho ho” laugh with their hand in front of their mouth
17. someone says “this isn’t a house…it’s a mansion!”
18. episode has a Ruri-type (aka expressionless loli)
19. episode has a hyper energetic girl
20. the magical can of coffee is used to solve a problem in the episode
21. main character has a stash of porn mags discovered
22. someone finishes everything on the table despite the food being awful
23. main character is indecisive and annoying in general yet has a harem (this is pretty much a freebie)
24. main character walks in on someone in the bathroom
25. main character walks in on someone changing
26. You are pretty much aware of what color underwear all of the female characters are wearing

• No parents: you can choose yourself whether you want to have them already dead, working in another country, or dying in episode 1.  Regardless it’s important that there are no adults in the house.
• Childhood friend: “the distance between childhood friend and lover is very thin” is a statement oft regurgitated in every show, so make sure that your Generime has one.  95% of childhood friends are female and are in charge of taking care of the protagonist of the show because…there are no parents.
• That seat in class: your character HAS to sit about halfway back in the class, next to the window.  This is not an option.
• Big boobs = that voice: there is only one seiyuu who can do the voice for your large breasted character.  She says “ararara” a lot and is usually the older sister of the childhood friend and pretty dense.
• Gravity distortion: remember that Japan has a different gravity field for breasts, so be sure to include significant movement with the slightest action.  This is the same phenomenon that causes the male characters to fall, landing with their hands/face on a breast/butt.  It also frequently causes female characters to fall off ladders/chairs and land with their crotch on the main character’s face.
• Tsundere cuisine: if your main female character is tsundere, she can’t cook.  Don’t argue, that’s just the way it is.
• Panty shots: put them in every shot
• That guy: every show has that guy who keeps a database of every girl’s measurements in the school.  It’s up to you if you want him to be mildly attractive but forever alone because he’s so perverted, or he could be dorky, or fat.
• A-set underwear: every girl, every day wears matching underwear; you can only deviate from this in the case of striped panties (shimapan.)

I hope this is good enough to get you started on your Generime.  Remember that if you don’t think you can manage any sort of story, throw as much Moe into it as possible.

Moverload

Being that this is the internet, there are always a lot of really pointless arguments going on about really pointless things; one of the discussions that seems to pop up a lot recently is whether Moe and every anime that has it is garbage.  The answer is no, but there is a disturbing trend where Moe is involved.  The way I see it, Moe is to anime as computer animation is to big-budget Hollywood movies.  You have movies like Lord of the Rings where the animation really helps the movie and many of the key scenes could not have been accomplished as well without it.  Then you have movies like Transformers 2 where they obviously spent more time rendering the special effects than they ever spent working on the script or finding stars who could act.  Computer animation is merely a tool and the way it’s used can leave you with either a clever, brilliant piece of work, or Jar-Jar Binks.

By now you’re thinking that’s nice, but what does it have to do with anime?  The recent trend with anime has been to take a very thin story with substandard animation and characters, slather a thick layer of Moe on top and serve it up to hordes of squealing otaku.  If it’s Moe enough, everyone will talk about how Moe this and that is and never once mention that the show doesn’t have a story at all, or that the characters are fresh pressed from the Moe-Mold.  Yet, here is where a lot of the people arguing this are getting it wrong…it really doesn’t matter.  There’s still plenty of really good anime with awesome stories and characters (Hatsukoi Limited for exmaple) being made and the Moepocalypse hasn’t affected this at all.

The other portion of this Moe argument is people complaining about what others are watching; it really doesn’t affect you at all and you aren’t being forced to watch it at gunpoint, so shut up about it.  On that same note, it would be nice if the people who watched those shows didn’t have to mention the word Moe every five minutes and talk about how Moe everything is in the show ad nauseum.

All in all, they make different kinds of cars and different kinds of music because not everyone likes the same things.  One person’s K-ON is another person’s Gundam and you the amount of negative input you should have on what someone else is watching is zero.

You're doing it wrong! OMG FAIL!

While I was sitting on a group call the other night with some of my classmates from Intro to Japanese and listening to this girl be obnoxious to the teacher, it occured to me that the internet has indeed made some people shockingly stupid.

The problem is that people are so used to flaming everyone on message boards and social media sites that they get a little too used to doing it and think that it’s okay to do it all of the time.  For example my teacher (keep in mind this is the first group session) asked if everyone was at a computer and had the class site open, and obnoxious weaboo girl says “we’re obviously at a computer, how else would be we on skype?”  She also proceeded to correct everyone on their pronunciation and inform everyone that she had been teaching herself Japanese for several years now.  (That always translates to: I totally fucking love Naruto and I made my mom buy me Rosetta Stone.)  After several more witty comments, the teacher finally asked her to leave the call (you know you’re off to a good start then) to which she said she didn’t mind staying on because she was used to having to go slower than she’d like because everyone else was so much slower than her.  She finally left the call after several rather unsubtle hints and things progressed normally after that, but that made me wonder why someone would be so overtly obnoxious to not just a teacher, but to a teacher that you’re supposed to be extra polite to in deference to her being a sensei in a Japanese class.

Then when you start looking at the way people generally treat each other on the inernet, where they don’t think twice about flaming someone for an innocent remark or for not liking Arashi as much as they do, someone who spends vast amounts of time on the internet would lose the ability to have a normal conversation with normal people in the real world.  I have often wondered what the truly obnoxious people are like in real life.  I know that some of them are really quiet and shy in person, then when they hop on the message boards they’re a bitter little flame thrower.  Some, as I found out the other night, are just unberable to talk to for any amount of time because they’re horribly obnoxious.

So here’s a little piece of advice; you’re really better off just not flaming anyone on the internet because it’s pointless and stupid in the first place, but if you are going to be that person, don’t actually do it in real life, because there’s a decent chance someone will punch you in the face repeatedly (and everyone around will cheer.)

Crappy Translation

Being the kind, thoughtful, otaku that I am, I always think that it’s better to go ahead and buy manga rather than just reading the scanslations online.  The problem with this is that some of the manga companies, Tokyopop being the worst offender, don’t do a good job.  While there are a lot of examples of this, the most recent one to irk me was Your & My Secret (also known as My Barbaric Girlfriend if you want to read the better version online.)  Here’s the setup of the story: a wussy guy and a girl who is beautiful yet brash end up swapping bodies through an experiment gone wrong.  So the guy you see in the picture is actually a girl and the girl in the picture is her best friend who she has started to like since turning into a guy.  In the scanslation she says that they are going to be late for “Anpanma Empire’s Counter Attack” which is obviously some form of martial arts / military / action flick.  Which is interesting because you have the girl inside of a guy’s body picking a very guy movie to see.  In the Tokyopop version she says that they are going to be late to see The Hannah Montana movie, which doesn’t fit in with her personality at all.  So why did Tokyopop decide to put in Hannah Montana rather than the original movie title?  If you think it’s because American audiences wouldn’t get what Anpanma Empire ‘s Counter Attack was, you’d be wrong as that movie doesn’t exist in Japan, either.  If you think it’s because Tokyopop just doesn’t care and is bad at their job, you’d be right.  One thing that Tokyopop habitually does is try to change the translations in manga so that it rings a bell with American audiences, but I don’t think they have any clue who their audience is.  Invoking the sacred tween name of Hannah Montana won’t cause tons of 12 year old girls to buy your manga, but it will cause the people who like and enjoy manga to cringe at something so obviously out of place.

Good Translation

You might think I’m being unfairly harsh about this, but this is just an example of something that Tokyopop and the others do all the time.  They try to make manga cool and edgy and trendy with the kids by putting in their own interpretations rather than translations.  In one scene at the beginning of the manga, the main character says “let’s go” and Tokyopop translates it to “let’s bounce.”  In the Tokyopop version of Boys Be, they have two of the characters checking a girl out and one says that she has a “badunkadunk butt.”  Boys Be is not a new manga at all; what are the odds that two Japanese guys 10 years ago were talking about someone’s badunkadunk butt?

So here’s what I want from you manga publishers: I want you to translate the manga.  I don’t care what you think tweenage girls might think it cool.  I don’t care what you think the characters might say if they were American.  I don’t care what you think they would say if they were on an MTV reality show.  I want to know what they said; I’d like to stress that I want to know WHAT THEY SAID, not what you think they might have said if they were this or that…just what they said.

Christmas!

It’s that time of year again, so here is a list of some of the anime episodes I’ve found featuring Christmas, feel free to add any others in the comments

• Chrno Crusade 12
• Those Who Hunt Elves II 9
• Mamotte Shugogetten 10
• Magikano 11
• Ah My Goddess II 3
• Always My Santa (Itsudatte My Santa)
• Futakoi 10
• Mamoru-kun 12
• Ai Yori Aoshi Enishi 0
• Fruits Basket 9(new years, but still)
• Read or Die 10
• Sister Princess 20
• Vandread 10
• Toradora 19
• Ichigo Mashimaro 12
• Hatuskoi Limited 06
• Love HIna Winter Wish
• Ranma OAV 2
• KissXSis OVA 2
• B Gata H Kei 04

Akin to that, I have decided to create the Weaboo Therapy Foundation for the treatment of such disorders as “everything would be better if I had been born in Japan” and “I wish I were in Japan” as well as the notorious condition of constantly saying “in Japan they…”  You may not realize if you, or someone you love is a weaboo, so there are several easy tests:

• do people not talk to you anymore because you won’t shutup about Japan?
• will you not shut up about Japan?

If you said yes to either of these, then you are likely a weaboo and you should immediately seek help at the WTF.  Our treatment options are cutting edge and range from shouting at you to shut the hell up, or showing you pictures of fat Japanese schoolgirls. We will also help you by taking the profits we make from curing you and using them to take a vacation in Japan where we will eat lots of fantastic food, see great tourist attractions, and buy awesome souvenirs (but we will come back and tell you that it was quite horrible.)

Hero!

There have been very few characters in anime that have made such an impact on everyone’s life as the can of coffee.  This seemingly simple can has acted as the Swiss-Army-Knife of relationship fixes in anime.  It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to say you’re sorry, trying to get together with that special someone, heal someone’s broken heart, or take your relationship to the next level, can of coffee is there for you.  The sad thing is that can of coffee is often ignored for all of its troubles; the can of coffee in the scre:enshot for instance just helped a young couple get over their awkwardness with each other, and how was it rewarded?  Left on the ground!  Hence, I aim to make a list of the shows that have benefited from the help of can of coffee (feel free to chime in with your can of coffee spottings):

• Hatsukoi Limited ep 7
• Boys Be ep 2
• Proposal Daisakusen ep 2
• Kimi no Iru Machi manga ch 30